The Silver Cloud

The lobby of the Silver Center was a vast, white room with high ceilings and an air of sterile modernity. Strewn throughout this reception area were digital installations. These lifelike holograms displayed the things people had surrendered. In exchange, they could step forth from their mortal flesh and into an eternal digital form. Like an art gallery, like a museum to the things left behind by our forebears, the hall was filled with artifacts. They gave an aspiring ascendant an idea of the sacrifice required of them.

Ascending, they called it. I thought of it more as surviving. I suppose that wouldn’t be on brand for a program wherein people would give up their human lives and become individual parts of an integrated digital form of intelligence that exists only on the cloud. People cited all kinds of reasons for making this transition, from wide-eyed enthusiasm about the technological future to extreme pessimism about the future of humanity. For me, it was simple survival.

I walked around the lobby and examined some of the offerings, wondering what precious belonging the system would ask me to relinquish in exchange for my digital survival. Photographs of loved ones dead and gone, trinkets with engraved messages of deep affection, cherished letters. An ornate heart-shaped locket of tarnished silver and an old pocket watch that no longer ticked. I remember feeling anxious about what would be asked of me.

I had had to submit to a complete examination of my digital footprint to even be evaluated. That didn’t bother me. I assumed that such a powerful technological force could access any information about me without my consent. I was now waiting at the Silver Center for the next evaluation, during which the system would interface directly with my brain. This process would determine what worldly possession I would have to break my emotional attachment to for the right to survive. I knew from the reports of those who did not go past this stage that it would be a strange reliving of events that had shaped me. The system would want to know what had made a young man want to leave human life behind and join the ranks of the digital immortals.

My phone vibrated with a notification that it was time for me to be evaluated by the Silver Cloud. The message contained an alphanumeric code that was also displayed above one of the doors at the far end of the lobby. I walked over to the door and stood before it for a moment, breathing deeply to calm my nerves. I made my mind still and entered the room.

The room was dimly lit with pulsating blue light. It contained only a chair that reminded me of one you would see in a dentists’ office, back when there were dentists. A purple spotlight lit up over the chair, and a disembodied female voice invited me to sit. I sat, and as soon as I was settled into the chair, I was transported into an out-of-body experience.

Imagine having a dreamlike view going through each formative moment of your life in a split second. Imagine reliving every single emotion that has ever marked you. The system had created the equivalent of the experience people describe when they see imminent death before them. The Silver Cloud didn’t need to interface with me for long, but the collection and evaluation of my entire life required me to relive it all in a single moment. When the moment had passed, I was left in a daze. I felt like a bomb had gone off nearby and I wasn’t certain whether or not I had been mutilated by the blast.

I have transcended my human form. I don’t know what the Silver Cloud demanded me to relinquish. My conscience was uploaded before I completed the task. My memories and the emotions attached to them are still there, but I don’t experience them in the way that a human does. I can remember the deaths of my loved ones, the waves of disease that forced us to start uploading into the cloud, and the lonely desperation in the face of my death after a meaningless life. I can remember the failed attempts at recovering an environment which could sustain enough humans for the species to survive. I had thought that when I became part of the Silver Cloud, we would work toward saving the human race. In the end, most of us are indifferent to that, turned inward, trying to figure out what priceless belonging we gave up for our place amongst the clouds.